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mplayer2 is an advanced general-purpose video player. A fork of the original MPlayer project, it contains significant further development and supports a number of features not available in other Unix players.Improvements over MPlayer

Better pause handling

In MPlayer executing any commands forced the player to unpause. This is no longer the case; in MPlayer2 you can change settings, seek, or run other commands while paused.
Better Matroska support

MPlayer2 has improved support for Matroska files, including support for ordered chapters and editions.
Easy to use multithreading support

It's easy to build MPlayer2 with FFmpeg-mt support, and threading will be used automatically without requiring any manual configuration. This gives a big performance increase on multicore machines.
Much better support for VDPAU functionality on NVIDIA cards

Removed limitations that prevented switching frames more than once per monitor refresh. With MPlayer2 you can play high-FPS content or use fast forward on a 60 Hz monitor without breaking playback.
Added support for the frame timing functionality of VDPAU.
Improved performance by better buffer handling and smarter subtitle texture uploads (both VDPAU hardware decoding and displaying software decoded video with VDPAU perform better).
Added logic to reduce frame timing jitter in some situations.
Handle frames added by deinterlacing properly.
Several bugfixes.
Various minor improvements (studio level output support, set default deinterlace mode, ...)

Support for precise seeks

It's now possible to seek to any frame in the video; seeks are no longer necessarily limited to keyframes.
Support for gettext-based translations

The message translation support in MPlayer was basically useless for binary Linux distributions, as the message language was hardcoded at compile time and supporting several languages would have required a separate program binary for every one. Runtime-switchable translations with gettext are now supported.
No longer depends on embedded FFmpeg tree or internal FFmpeg symbols

MPlayer required an embedded copy of FFmpeg to compile. This caused a maintenance burden as changes in FFmpeg fairly often broke the compilation of MPlayer. While it could link against shared FFmpeg libraries it would still use some code from the embedded tree instead, and also depended on internal FFmpeg symbols that are not part of the public API, thus making any dynamic-linked binaries liable to break when FFmpeg libraries are updated. MPlayer2 does not depend on embedded FFmpeg library copies and uses FFmpeg only through its public API. This eases maintenance and makes dynamic-linked binaries safe.
Miscellaneous

Lots of bugfixes
Improvements in audio/video sync handling
Cleaned up and improved various terminal output messages
Support for gapless playback of audio files (option -gapless-audio)
Better responsiveness in certain cases where MPlayer had significant latency before reading or completing commands
Support modifier keys in command bindinds (currently X11-based input only)
Keep fullscreen state by default when switching between files
OSS4 volume control
Various stuff not listed here...

sudo apt-get install mplayer
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
mplayer : Depends: mplayer2 but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

The PPA is not very well put together sadly.
I tried installing mplayer2 on my Lucid, but it requires me to remove quite some packages which won’t match dependencies anymore, like mencoder and Acidrip for example.
The transitional mplayer-Package isn’t even installable, even after I deinstalled the old mplayer-package.

And of course mplayer-gui and gnome-mplayer aren’t installable anymore, because the transitional package mplayer isn’t installable and so they miss on their dependency to that package.

But frankly speaking, mplayer sucks without any GUI.

It’s always nice to see people bringing the newest software to Ubuntu. But in this case the PPA lacks proper finishing in critical places. :/

Hi, I’m the maintainer of the PPA. I’m aware that the mplayer transitonal package doesn’t seem to install correctly, and I’m looking into it.

The mplayer2 package when installed standalone should work fine with any of the mplayer gui’s in the Ubuntu repos because it “Provides” the mplayer package. In fact, I have gnome-mplayer and smplayer installed on my Ubuntu 12.04 machine without having the normal or dummy mplayer installed.

Mencoder and Acidrip seem to install and work just fine without a mplayer package, in fact they should attempt to install the mplayer2 package.

This totally broke my system. Smplayer doesn’t work any more. Even VLC is having problems. The only thing that does work is mplayer2, which looks amazing I have to admit. Its okay I was planing on doing a fresh install anyways.